Joni Mitchell - Court And Spark

Released - January 1974

Genre - Folk Jazz

Producer - Joni Mitchell

Selected Personnel - Joni Mitchell (Vocals/Guitar/Piano); John Guerin (Drums/Percussion); Wilton Felder (Bass); Tom Scott (Woodwinds); Chuck Findley (Trumpet); Joe Sample (Electric Piano); David Crosby (Backing Vocals); Graham Nash (Backing Vocals); Larry Carlton (Guitar); Cheech Marin (Vocals); Tommy Chong (Vocals)

Standout Track - Help Me

It's been a while since I've written about Joni Mitchell here, largely due to the fact that I've always considered her 1972 album For The Roses to be a bit of a by-the-numbers letdown, though in fairness following up the exquisitely beautiful Blue with anything even half as good would have been a tall order. While For The Roses was well-received at the time, Mitchell was perhaps aware of the fact that it wasn't quite up to the standard of her previous albums and took a full year off in 1973 to really focus herself on the writing for her next record, which would ultimately become the most commercially successful album of her career. This is a position that's always puzzled me, as it's some distance from being Joni's best record - it lacks the incredible imaginative breadth and invention of her more experimental jazz albums from 1975 to 1979, and also lacks the devastatingly honest and insightful confessional storytelling or narrative poetry of her earlier, more stripped-back singer-songwriter fare. As such, it's always huddled nearer the bottom of the list of Joni albums to have my affection, occasionally making me wonder whether it should be included on this list or not. Ultimately, though, what it does that struck such a chord with the public is that it distils all of her songcraft and lyrical majesty into a collection of simple, catchy, upbeat pop tunes which, while they might not be pieces of groundbreaking art, are undeniably great music.

It also does begin to nudge towards the more experimental streak that would take dominance in her albums in the later 70s. During her year off she began to take a keener interest in jazz music and to start introducing elements of it into her songwriting and arrangements. "Help Me" in particular features jazzy horns and trumpet flourishes and chirpy jazz-like backing vocals, while similar flourishes and moments of jazzy orchestration throughout the album. "Car On A Hill" boasts further great jazzy horn interludes. Even some of the rhythms and song structures, as on the shuffling, slightly off-beat melody of "Free Man In Paris" feel looser and freer than the simpler folk music of her earlier work, and there's certainly a sense here that the music is beginning to move towards a more unusual extreme, although here such elements keep themselves restrained enough for the music itself to be simple and easily listened to. The musical pallette is extended too, being less focussed purely on Joni's guitar and piano but fleshing things out to a full band soon on pretty much every song, the sound diversified by the odd screech of Larry Carlton's electric guitar or the rumbling crash of John Guerin's drums.

The musical mood of Court And Spark is generally one of upbeat, sunny optimism in stark contrast to the desperately sad and mournful tone of Blue. Here, Joni sounds like someone who has moved through despair and loss and arrived at a kind of optimistic equilibrium that sees her looking towards the future. The warm chord sequences and full, rich sound of her acoustic guitar infuses nearly every song with this sense of mellow optimism, but the lyrics themselves feel slightly more circumspect. If a single theme can be identified in Court And Spark, I'd say it's largely about the wariness of giving in totally to love. On Blue we saw Mitchell honestly and frankly lamenting the breakdown of her relationship with James Taylor, a woman broken by love and finding strength in her music. Here she feels happier and more self-reliant, but someone who has definitely been made more cautious. It's there in the opening title track, where she speaks of being almost obsessively intrigued by a new object of affection but unable to totally give in to her interest in him - "The more he talked to me the more he reached me, but I couldn't let go of LA, city of the fallen angels."

On "Help Me," a song that's surprisingly lyrically simplistic for a songwriter of Joni's talents, she sings of the "trouble" of falling in love, and the dilemma of knowing "you know your loving, but not like you love your freedom." It's there again on the jazzy "Car On A Hill," where she casts herself as a nervous girl desperately and anxiously waiting for a lover to come and collect her as the hours tick by. All of it speaks of someone who's been hurt by love before and is now ever more cautious of the world around her and the pain that can come from giving in to it too whole-heartedly. It's not the only theme explored, though - on "Free Man In Paris" she pays homage to David Geffen of Asylum Records, a man so devoted to "stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song" that he is unable to live the simple life he would love, as a free man. Then there's the absolutely wonderful "Down To You," at once perhaps both the bleakest and most hopeful song on the album, which sees Joni taking stock of how her opinions of the world and of herself have changed over time, and what that change means. "Old friends seem indifferent, you must have brought that on, old bonds have broken down, love is gone." Ultimately, beneath all the changing and shifting moods and values of a lifetime she comes to a joyously positive conclusion, placing total control of one's outlook on the person themself - "You're a brute, you're an angel, you can crawl, you can fly too, it's down to you, it all comes down to you." The song is also notable for the lovely orchestration that decorates its mid-section between verses.

"Down To You" is the most maudlin and downbeat the music or lyrics ever gets on Court And Spark, and the mood is resolutely lifted again afterwards with the upbeat fun of songs like "Raised On Robbery" (seemingly about an encounter between a self-pitying prostitute and a disinterested potential customer) and "Twisted," featuring none other than Cheech and Chong as guest vocalists, ensuring that the mood stays an optimistic one. It's perhaps that cheeky sense of fun, largely absent from most of Mitchell's previous albums, that ensured that the record reached such a wide audience and became enshrined (perhaps unfairly to some of the better work she did elsewhere) as her most popular album. But beneath its sunny exterior is evidence of a vulnerable woman still struggling to maintain her strength and fortitude, yet this album not only explores that sense of trying to find and sustain confidence for the future, it also provides her with the means of achieving it. In the jazz flourishes of Court And Spark Joni found the seed of an idea that would come to define her work over the next few years and see her creating by far the most interesting and imaginative work of her entire career. For that reason, Court And Spark is, for me, very much a transitional album rather than a career pinnacle in itself, journeying from the intimacy and simplicity of her early work to the experimental audaciousness of things to come. And if an artist is able to achieve enormous commercial success with an album that's ultimately a transition from one artistic peak to another then that artist must be a very special one indeed.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Joni Mitchell except where noted.

1. Court And Spark

2. Help Me

3. Free Man In Paris

4. People's Parties

5. Same Situation

6. Car On A Hill

7. Down To You

8. Just Like This Train

9. Raised On Robbery

10. Trouble Child

11. Twisted (Annie Ross & Wardell Gray)